Cocoon is now the Okra App Framework

Today I would like to announce that the Cocoon framework is now know as the ‘Okra App Framework’. It still includes the great features previously available in the Cocoon framework, but from now onwards will be developed under the new name.

How to Get The Okra App Framework

The ‘Okra App Framework’ CodePlex site is available at http://okra.codeplex.com/ (all previous code/downloads/discussions have been migrated from the old site, and any links to the previous URLs will redirect to their new location).

In addition there are two new NuGet packages,

• “Okra App Framework” – This will be the package for most users and includes the MEF dependencies and the ‘OkraBootstrapper’ class.
• “Okra App Framework (Core only)” – For users who only require the core assembly.

If you are using the Cocoon NuGet packages and wish to get future releases then you should use the NuGet package manager to uninstall Cocoon and then install the new Okra App Framework package.

Okra App Framework Release 0.9.3-beta

Along with the name change a new version of the framework has been released via NuGet and the Okra App Framework CodePlex downloads page. The changes include,

• Namespace changes from ‘Cocoon’ to ‘Okra’ and from ‘CocoonBootstrapper’ to ‘OkraBootstrapper’ (a simple find-and-replace in your project should solve any errors occurring from this).
• Addition of a SearchManager that allows an easy, view-model centric, implementation of the Windows 8 Search contract (I will aim to detail this in a future blog post).
• The ActivationManager class allows extensible handling of application activation (you can write activation handlers to handle any of the activation types).
• Upgraded to MEF version 1.0.13-rc.
• Removal of the previous obsoleted VirtualizingVector with the recommendation that VirtualizingVectorBase is used going forward (although if you still require VirtualizingVector it can be downloaded as part of any of the previous source releases and copied into your own projects).

Why the Name Change?

I recently received a message from a member of the Apache Software Foundation, informing me that they also have a web application framework named Apache Cocoon. To avoid any confusion that may arise between the two frameworks the best approach going forward was a name change.